Internet Explorer 8 — Microsoft’s latest release, currently at the Beta 2 stage — was declared to be the safest (aka more secure than Firefox 3.1 Beta and Chrome Beta) but the least popular browser, according to a browser security survey.

On Wednesday, Utest, a social-networking and software testing company, announced the results of its Bug Battle browser contest. The event included participation from 1,330 security pros, hobbyists and tech enthusiasts, who found an alarming 672 bugs in the world’s top three Web browsers.

Contest participants scavenged for bugs in IE8, Firefox 3.1 and the new Google Chrome browser, which just emerged from its beta stage.

A post-contest survey found that Internet Explorer was the only browser program not to receive a single “excellent” rating. Despite that result, IE8 was a relatively safer browser to use. Google Chrome clocked in with the most vulnerabilities (297 bugs). Open source counterpart Firefox had 207 bugs. Testers found just 169 bugs in IE8.

Apple’s Safari and Opera were not rated. At the time of the contest, IE8, Chrome and Firefox 3.1 were all still in various beta releases.

Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism career back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

I agree with a previous commenter: bug != security vulnerability. This sounds like a bunch of geeks gathering together to prove how smart they all are. What really counts is how these browsers perform in the wild, and out in the real world, IE has been the overwhelmingly poorest choice for online security time and again.

WTH? I mean why ignore top quality browsers like Safari and Opera. Opera has been making browsers since 1994 and was one of the first ones out there. Wouldn’t people want to know how such an experienced browser fared?
On Safari. Safari is the third most popular web browser by a mile. From Netapplications it has shown that the IE has around 70%, while Firefox has 20% and Safari has 5-6% while Opera and Chrome have around 1% each. Isn’t is prudent to choose Safari as well? Also it would have also been a microsoft vs apple thing which uTest could have taken advantage of. They need to make better choices

this survey isn’t successful,more like saying , who can run fast dog or ant and then saying dog is the fastest runner on the planet.
Opera is the most secure 7 more bugs fixed in the latest release 9.63

well, as i have read the other statements and opinions of other people… i think that ie is not considered the safest… Well i really think that no web browser is safe coz, well, spam, viruses and bugs are still infesting your computer… but i think opera and mozilla are safer than ie8

I would like to point out that although chrome has 297 bugs initially looking to be the most insecure, these bugs are extremely difficult to exploit. additionally even to hack this, each tab is sandboxed so you are still back to square one. in the recent Pwn2Own contest this was the only browser uncracked by the end